This robotic medical device looks and barks like a puppy

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If the robot revolution looks like this, you might not have much to worry about. Sitting on a table at National Harbor in Maryland is a robot named Jenny. She’s six and a half pounds, about the size actually of an actual yellow lab puppy, which is what she’s designed to look like.

With input from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and nine little motors inside of her, she can tilt her head, raise her eyes and flop her ears.

The tail wags as fast as a real puppy’s. She even barks. Jenny is about 10 years in the making, and while she looks a bit like a stuffed animal, she’s not a toy.

This robotic dog is an FDA-approved medical device.

“This was inspired by my mother, who after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia, I had to take away her dog for safety reasons,” said Tom Stevens, the founder and CEO of Tombot. “When I had to take away my mom’s dog, she was furious with me. Every day was, ‘Where’s my dog? Why can’t I have my dog? When am I getting my dog back?'”

Stevens was at National Harbor this week showing off Jenny to the Gerontological Society of America, a conference for researchers and scientists who study aging. Jenny might be cute enough to impress a child, but it’s the child’s grandparent who is really the target for this tool.

“It’s a neurological biofeedback device,” Stevens said. “She basically is providing interaction for people that have serious behavioral health challenges and allowing them to self-soothe through those symptoms.”

Stevens said the lives of seniors with dementia are “shrinking” rapidly.

“They go from living independently to living with somebody’s care. Very few seniors in their 80s or 90s have live animals any longer because of the burden of care, cost, health adversity or living restrictions, and so what we’re doing is actually filling a void,” he said.

It turns out, human interaction with artificial intelligence chatbots and robots can be beneficial to people whose cognitive functioning is declining, whether through aging or a disease like Alzheimer’s.

“Through emotional attachment, they stimulate positive changes in the brain’s neurochemistry,” Stevens said. “It’s a complex cocktail of neurochemicals, including serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, but what’s thought to be hardest at work is oxytocin, sometimes known as the love drug. Oxytocin is known to reduce stress and anxiety, and it’s a highly effective pain reliever as it interacts with our own internal opioid system. So through the emotional attachment, they stimulate the positive changes in the brain’s neurochemistry.”

Stevens has spent the last decade trying to get this robotic dog to market, though originally it wasn’t necessarily a dog he was trying to create. He has about 100,000 orders already from about 100 different countries around the world. Right now you can order ones that look like various Labrador retrievers.

He said he hopes to start shipping this first generation of dog early next year, and to expand to other breeds and cats in the future. And while his original focus was on those with various forms of dementia, there’s wider interest than that.

“About 71% of our preorder and waitlist customers are ordering it for different purposes, including level two, level three autism, intellectual developmental disabilities, traumatic brain injury, stroke, people with cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis,” Stevens said. “Basically, anybody who has some kind of cognitive limitation, either due to something they were born with, or a disease, or some accident that may have occurred during their life, and providing them an opportunity to self-soothe through things like anxiety, depression, delirium, in my mother’s case, hallucinations and violent anger.”

Jenny sells for about $1,500 and Stevens said they’re FSA and HSA eligible. He’s also working with assisted living and memory care providers. It charges with a USB-C cord (the same most modern cellphones use), and when you download the app, you can name the dog so it’ll respond to you.

“Once named, she’ll only respond to that given name,” he said. “She can feel herself being picked up and held, so she knows if she is, she shouldn’t squirm and risk being dropped.”

In fact, because this was originally built for those who need in-home care, it doesn’t walk or do anything that requires it being anywhere but on your lap, so it doesn’t become a tripping hazard.

“A senior with dementia, by definition, is fully disabled, and so that means they need around-the-clock care, typically from an unpaid family member,” Stevens said. “That family member is the one who’s going to be getting the door, or answering the phone, or cleaning the house, cooking things. What the robot does is help make their life easier, so they have time to cook meals or run a load of laundry, just by keeping this person occupied and happier.”

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